OpenEmail against
Forward Email
line by line.
Their list price is $3 / month, unlimited domains, checked in August 2026. Ours counts domains rather than people, so the two lines below diverge with the size of your team.
What they are better at
Cheap, open source, and honest about what it is. Unlimited aliases on unlimited domains, forwarded to wherever you already read mail.
Why people move
It forwards, so you still need a mailbox at the other end and you still send as that mailbox. Replies go out from the address you forwarded to rather than the one people wrote to. OpenEmail is the destination as well as the routing, so the address you publish is the address you send from.
Forward Emailforwarding only
FastmailStandard
OpenEmailper domain
Google WorkspaceBusiness Starter
Superhuman+ WorkspaceLine by line.
Forward Email is not a mailbox, so it is not on this table. The table compares the places mail actually lands, which is the choice Forward Email sits beside rather than replaces.
| Compared | OpenEmail per domain | Fastmail Standard | Proton Mail Mail Essentials | Google Workspace Business Starter | HEY for Domains per person | Superhuman + Workspace |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| What you actually pay for | The workspace | Each person | Each person | Each person | Each person | Each person, twice |
| Five people, every month | $30 | $25 | $34.95 | $35 | $58 | $160 |
| Twentieth person costs | $0 | $5 | $6.99 | $7 | $12 | $32 |
| Hosts the mail itself | a client on top of Gmail or Outlook | |||||
| Catch-all on your own domain | yours to switch on | paid plans | via a routing rule | aliases; catch-all not documented | whatever the host does | |
| Free on your own domain | one domain, ten addresses | trial only | custom domains are paid | trial only | no trial on domains | trial only |
| Drafts, subjects and answers from AI | writing assistant only | Gemini | Business tier | |||
| Your own agent can work the inbox | MCP server | JMAP API | API, no MCP | |||
| End-to-end encryption | between OpenEmail mailboxes | their whole point | enterprise tiers |
